Ai won't put you out of your job, Supplying your specialized knowledge & skill to it will.

[circuitbored]

I was on TikTok the other day just browsing, and a pop-up came up on my screen, encouraging me to make a new template for them with the possibility of profiting form making it attached. This piqued my usual skepticism of social media work schemes, as I have spent many years creating and uploading to the platform without ever making a dime. I am not resentful about how I've spent that time, as I have learned valuable content creation skills like video editing and 3D design, but I couldn't help thinking about how platforms now, on top of not paying creators for the content they produce are now crowdsourcing the development they would normally pay developers for, under the guise of a profit contest... It made me concerned that this is a trend of modern social media now...

I'm pretty sure that most of the people who spend time developing filters and features for TikTok won't see any useful pay from doing so, but from TikTok's corporate operations, this method of encouraging people to do free work will likely prove quite profitable. It's a troubling sign of our future, a world where everyone shut out of jobs suddenly has to participate in competitions to be underpaid or even not paid at all, and that well may become our only options as Ai replaces art, music, and many other careers that people could serve. The worst part of being replaced by Ai is that no matter how you look at it, the end product of Ai is often soul-less, emotionless, and repetitively unoriginal if you ask people that know what human artists and scholars are truly capable of.

The practice of making users contribute work to build platforms that they would normally hire employees to do. This is also concerning in a world where human layoffs are accelerating and companies are confidently proclaiming their use of Ai as a contrast to laying off employees.

The question is truly "What is driving this trend?". The truth of the matter in many cases is that it's our own damn fault.

We've spent many years answering questions posted online to the view of the entire world. We've done tons of corporate surveys, we've published our music and art online as a part of contests, and now we're at a point where that process can easily be consumed, shredded, co-opted, and regurgitated by people and corporations with their own brand slapped on it (and no reference to the original source) like we never mattered. The worst part is most of our original ideas originally gain little visibility or credit until they are consumed, shredded, co-opted, and regurgitated by large corporate Ai products or popular individuals.

As many know, modern Ai tools operate based on data scraped from the open Internet, and also in closed circles based on content gathered from private communities. These learning models consist of content that individual contributors (us as users) make regularly on platforms like Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Gmail (possibly even) --- you name it. When we have an idea that we share online, there is absolutely nothing to stop it form becoming untraceable and unidentifiable knowledge within an Ai tool made by anyone elsewhere... There was also no clear contract for ownership of ideas in social media or online posts, but there's a good chance that the spaghetti bowl of End User Agreements covers that permission or can be updated at any time to do so by whichever platform we typed our ideas on, without compensating us in any way ever. What are we supposed to do now? Go back to writing our unique ideas and solutions to problems solely offline? Are we going to starve social media of creative content? The practice of Ai data source scraping and content ownership will be just as large a discussion as Ai effectiveness will be. A huge conflict is also how information from uncompensated sources can then be monetized as a service by the companies that re-sell that data too, I think there's a huge conflict in that.

Social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and many other platforms encourage users to detail their personal process for creating art, and they also encourage scientists and doctors to offer their educated opinions and even detailed methods of how they do their work... Even musicians are running live events where they show down to the very tools used in how they create their music down to the mastering process. At some point we've got to acknowledge that we are the ones wittingly and unwittingly sharing all of our specialized skills, life lessons, and knowledge so much that it well may be the case that we're the ones putting ourselves out of work into the future. Specialized trades and methods were not shared widely in print or even verbally in the past, and perhaps that's a big reason why there was more job stability for many in those days as well if you think about it objectively.

It's not Ai putting us out of jobs in my opinion, it's the endless stream of people willing to expose their methods for doing skilled work that is teaching Ai and everyone else how to fake expertise in our various skilled labor fields that will ultimately put an end to our ability to have careers in our fields of choice... Citing all of the above, perhaps sometimes ask yourself if you really need to post a tutorial on social media instead of being a skill snitch for likes and follows. Your work future depends on it. :P